San Francisco Giants’ Matt Chapman scores the winning run on a Thairo Estrada hit as San Diego Padres catcher Luis Campusano takes the late throw, Friday, April 5, 2024, in the home opener at Oracle Park in San Francisco, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
SAN FRANCISCO — A sellout crowd roared and rose to its feet Friday afternoon as Matt Chapman rounded third and raced home, sliding headfirst to score on Thairo Estrada’s walkoff double, but possibly none of the 40,645 on hand were as relieved as Michael Conforto to see the winning run cross the plate.
Thrown out on the bases in the third inning, Conforto made one of a handful of mental errors from the home team that nearly soured the first game this season on the shores of McCovey Cove. That is, until Estrada sent a fastball from Padres reliever Enyel De Los Santos to the wall in left-center field.
The Giants walked off the Padres, 3-2, snapping a four-game losing streak and sending the capacity crowd home happy.
“Thank God we won,” said manager Bob Melvin, who notched a win in his first home opener in a Giants uniform since 1986. “Because we did a couple things early in the game that basically swung the game to their side.”
Conforto made an out on the bases that risked to outshine his 3-for-4 day at the plate. Mike Yastrzemski struck out with the tying run on third, extending his hitless streak to start the season to 11 at-bats. Jordan Hicks misfired a would-be double-play ball into center field that led to a run.
Those mistakes quickly faded into the Giants’ memories as the ball off Estrada’s bat sailed toward the wall and Chapman took off from first base. As Estrada chugged into second base, he raised both arms over his head in celebration, turned and watched Chapman slide past the glove of catcher Luis Campusano.
“When I saw the ball come off my bat and where it was, I knew that Chappy was going to try and score,” Estrada said through Spanish-language interpreter Erwin Higueros. “I saw the whole play. I know that Chappy likes to play really hard. I know that he wants to win.”
Melvin said, “Matt Williams (the third base coach) was going to send him pretty much regardless at that point in time. I was just hoping it didn’t bounce over the fence (for a ground-rule double). If it stayed in, I knew he was going to score.”
Before piling onto the field, the Giants’ dugout broke out into such pandemonium that they took some friendly fire.
“Jung Hoo (Lee) was waiving Chappy in and he smoked me right in the chin. Almost bit my tongue,” Conforto said. “He was very, very apologetic about it. We’re all good, Jung Hoo, it’s fine. But it was awesome to see Thairo get that hit. Great way to end the home opener. I’m really glad we won that one. For other reasons.”
The hot bat Conforto brought with him on the opening road trip accompanied him back to San Francisco. Raising his batting average to .433 and his OPS to 1.336, Conforto doubled home Lee to get the Giants on the board in the bottom of the first, finishing 3-for-4 with another double to lead off the third.
It was then, after Chapman reached on a fielder’s choice following the double, that Conforto made his grave mistake on the base paths.
The Padres’ starter, Dylan Cease, sent multiple pitches to the backstop, and when Conforto saw him not covering home plate after he had advanced to third, he took an aggressive turn looking to take a second base and score, which at the time would have tied the score at 2.
Instead, he was caught in no-man’s land between third and home and was tagged out. The Giants went from having runners at second and third and nobody out to one man on and one out, walking away from the inning empty handed after Yastrzemski went down swinging with Chapman 90 feet away from home plate.
“It was very, very stupid,” Conforto said. “Just being overly aggressive. I saw that Cease didn’t go to the plate and I didn’t really check where Campusano was. Tried to make something happen and completely took the air out of that inning.”
Melvin has preached the fundamentals since the first team meeting he led at the start of spring training.
Even hours before Friday’s game, Melvin stressed the importance of “putting on a show” during the home opener. He arrived at Oracle Park at about 6:30 a.m., too early for his family to offer him well wishes in person. “But,” he said, “they realize what this day means to me.”
“We have to be really good about the intangible stuff. We’ve talked about that,” Melvin said afterward. “Situational at-bats. Fielding our position. Not running into outs. We weren’t great at it early. Got a couple of scratch runs late and certainly a big hit in the ninth.”
The knock from Estrada was only his fifth hit of the season, his second for extra bases. He took a .148 batting average and .494 OPS into the home opener, and Melvin noted that the second baseman was expanding the strike zone too much, having struck out eight times in 27 at-bats.
“He picked the right time to get going,” Melvin said. “When you don’t get off to a good start, sometimes you try to do a little too much. He can cover a lot of the plate but hasn’t been swinging at good pitches. He got a good pitch there and he drove it.”
The late theatrics and sloppy play early nearly overshadowed the longest career start for Hicks, who received a rousing ovation as he walked off the mound after the top of the seventh inning. Hicks hadn’t completed more than five innings as a starter in the major leagues, going all the way back to 2017 in Single-A to remember the last time he had a seven next to his name in the box score.
“It felt good to be out there for that. It gave me even more of an urge to push myself a bit,” said Hicks, a converted reliever. “My goal is go as many innings this year as I can.”
Facing the star-studded Padres lineup for the second time in a little over a week, Hicks limited them to two runs (one earned) on five hits. He struck out five and didn’t throw a fourth ball to a single one, finding the strike zone on 61 of his 91 pitches and firing his fastest offering of the game, a 99 mph heater, to his final hitter.
Whereas Hicks told Melvin after his fifth inning in his first start that he was out of gas, he relayed a different message to the manager when he returned to the dugout after pitching around a double from Jurickson Profar in the sixth.
“He was standing there like if I extended my hand, he was willing and ready to take me out,” Hicks said.
But the manager asked Hicks how he was feeling and, according to Melvin, “he said, ‘I feel great, as good as I’ve felt.’ So I let him go back out. It was easy. He said I feel great. I felt like he had a lot left. He deserved it. It was a great outing.”
